In many cases, the end of the year gives you time to step back and take stock of the last 12 months. This is when many of us take a hard look at what worked and what did not, complete performance reviews, and formulate plans for the coming year. For me, it is all of those things plus a time when I u...

Results announced during Centennial Indian Science Congress 3-7 January 2013 in Kolkata

A recent analysis by Elsevier shows that India has a 0.6% net inflow of scientists. Moreover, incoming scientists and short-term visiting (or transitory) scientists are significantly more productive than scientists who remain in India and scientists that leave the country. India is not losing productive brains, but is in fact an importer of productive brains.

Dr. Michiel Kolman, Senior Vice-President Academic Relations at Elsevier, attending the Centennial Indian Science Congress, commented, "India shows a net inflow of scientists, with the productivity of the incoming and visiting scientists being higher than that of the average staying and outgoing scientist; so in fact a case can be made for an Indian 'Brain Gain' rather than the commonly believed 'Brain Drain'."

Using Elsevier's Scopus database, publication data was studied over a 15-year period tracking migration streams of scientists using their affiliations and hence the country they publish in. The size of the migration streams was analyzed revealing that 64.1% of the scientists stayed within India during the 15-year study period, 23.4% were visiting (or transitory) researchers (traveling in or out of India for a period less than 2 years), 6.6% moved to and 6.0% left India; summing up to a net inflow of 0.6%.

The level of productivity of these migration groups was measured by publication output and expressed relative to India's country average publication output set to one. Analyses showed that incoming scientists (6.6% of the total number of scientists studied) are most productive (1.38 where 1.00 is the average publication output for India), visiting or transitory scientists (23.4%) are almost as productive (1.34), while outgoing scientists (6.0%) are below average in productivity (0.95).

These results can be put into international context by comparison with the UK and China. Both the UK and China display similar patterns as India: all three countries import scientists that are more productive than their country average and they all export scientists that are less productive.

Group size comparative analyses of outgoing scientists revealed: 6.0% for India, 10.0% for UK and 2.1% for China; with productivity levels at 0.95, 0.92 and 0.99 respectively, consistently below country publication average for all three countries.

Group size comparative analyses of incoming scientists revealed: 6.6% for India, 8.5% for UK and 7.1% for China; with productivity levels at 1.38, 1.14 and 1.85 respectively; consistently higher than country publication average for all three countries, and significantly higher for India and China.

Group size comparative analyses of visiting (or transitory) scientists revealed: 23.4% for India, 44.4% for UK and 16.0% for China, with productivity levels at 1.34, 1.24 and 1.22 respectively; again more productive than country publication averages.

Group size comparative analyses of staying scientists in the 15-year study period revealed: 64.1% for India, 37.2% for UK and 74.9% for China, with productivity levels 0.75, 0.60 and 0.74 respectively; all significantly below the country averages, with the UK being the least productive.

Further comparing level of mobility (incoming, visiting and outgoing), it was found that mobility is substantially higher for the UK compared to China or India with 62.8% of all scientists from the UK moving around during the 15-year study period, compared to 35.9% for India and 25.1% for China.

About Elsevier

Elsevier is a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. The company works in partnership with the global science and health communities to publish more than 2,000 journals, including The Lancet and Cell, and close to 20,000 book titles, including major reference works from Mosby and Saunders. Elsevier's online solutions include ScienceDirect, Scopus, Reaxys, ClinicalKey and Mosby's Nursing Suite, which enhance the productivity of science and health professionals, and the SciVal suite and MEDai's Pinpoint Review, which help research and health care institutions deliver better outcomes more cost-effectively.

A global business headquartered in Amsterdam, Elsevier employs 7,000 people worldwide. The company is part of Reed Elsevier Group PLC, a world-leading publisher and information provider, which is jointly owned by Reed Elsevier PLC and Reed Elsevier NV. The ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange).

In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Mike Johnston, an infrastructure engineer at Supergiant.io, discussed how to use Kubernetes to set up a SaaS infrastructure for your business. Mike Johnston is an infrastructure engineer at Supergiant.io with over 12 years of experience designing, dep...

As many know, the first generation of Cloud Management Platform (CMP) solutions were designed for managing virtual infrastructure (IaaS) and traditional applications. But that’s no longer enough to satisfy evolving and complex business requirements. In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, S...

When you focus on a journey from up-close, you look at your own technical and cultural history and how you changed it for the benefit of the customer. This was our starting point: too many integration issues, 13 SWP days and very long cycles. It was evident that in this fast-paced indu...

Cloud adoption is often driven by a desire to increase efficiency, boost agility and save money. All too often, however, the reality involves unpredictable cost spikes and lack of oversight due to resource limitations.
In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Joe Kinsella, CTO and Founder ...

“Why didn’t testing catch this” must become “How did this make it to testing?” Traditional quality teams are the crutch and excuse keeping organizations from making the necessary investment in people, process, and technology to accelerate test automation. Just like societies that did n...